Queed eBook

Mr. Bangor once more winked at the six. “Why,
Plonny, I thought you were rooting for Charles Gardenia
West.”

“Then there’s two of ye,” said Plonny,
dryly, “he being the other one.”

He removed his unlighted cigar, and spat loudly into
a tall brass cuspidor, which he had taken the precaution
to place for just such emergencies.

“Meachy,” said Plonny, slowly, “I
wouldn’t give the job of dog-catcher to a man
you couldn’t trust to stand by his friends.”

XXVIII

How Words can be like Blows, and Blue Eyes stab deep; how Queed
sits by a Bedside and reviews his Life; and how a Thought leaps at
him and will not down.

In the first crushing burst of revelation, Queed had
had a wild impulse to wash his hands of everything,
and fly. He would pack Surface off to a hospital;
dispose of the house; escape back to Mrs. Paynter’s;
forget his terrible knowledge, and finally bury it
with Surface. His reason fortified the impulse
at every point. He owed less than nothing to his
father; he had not the slightest responsibility either
toward him or for him; to acknowledge the relation
between them would do no conceivable good to anybody.
He would go back to the Scriptorium, and all would
be as it had been before.

But when the moment came either to go or to stay,
another and deeper impulse rose against this one,
and beat it down. Within him a voice whispered
that though he might go back to the Scriptorium, he
would never be as he had been before. Whether
he acknowledged the relation or not, it was still
there. And, in time, his reason brought forth
material to fortify this impulse, too: it came
out in brief, grim sentences which burned themselves
into his mind. Surface was his father. To
deny the primal blood-tie was not honorable.
The sins of the fathers descended to the children.
To suppress Truth was the crowning blasphemy.

Queed did not go. He stayed, resolved, after
a violent struggle—­it was all over in the
first hour of his discovery—­to bear his
burden, shouldering everything that his sonship involved.

By day and by night the little house stood very quiet.
Its secret remained inviolate; the young man was still
Mr. Queed, the old one still Professor Nicolovius,
who had suffered the last of his troublesome “strokes.”
Inside the darkened windows, life moved on silent heels.
The doctor came, did nothing, and went. The nurse
did nothing but stayed. Queed would have dismissed
her at once, except that that would have been bad
economy; he must keep his own more valuable time free
for the earning of every possible penny. To run
the house, he had, for the present, his four hundred
and fifty dollars in bank, saved out of his salary.
This, he figured, would last nine weeks. Possibly
Surface would last longer than that: that remained
to be seen.